Northwest Seaport Alliance makes headway since last year’s integration

The alliance, which was formed one year ago between the ports of Seattle and Tacoma, is 90 percent complete with the design for Terminal 5 in Seattle, another terminal that could eventually handle megaships.    The Northwest Seaport Alliance between the Port of Seattle and Port of Tacoma, which has put their seaport operations under single management, celebrated its one year anniversary this week.
   “We’re proud to say the partnership is working,” Port of Seattle Commission President John Creighton said. “Going into any new venture and particularly one between two seaports that have been very fierce competitors for the last hundred years, I felt that there would be many more political hiccups in terms of commission level governance issues and I’m really happy to say that things are going smoothly in that regard the two commissions are working well together.”
   The alliance was formed in the face of a “bloodbath in the global shipping world over the last number of years and our slipping market share,” Creighton said. “We really understood that we had to do something differently to really claw back that market share, protect jobs in our harbor and really cut a bold new path.”
   Since 40 percent of Washington State’s family wage jobs are connected to international trade, Creighton said its mission really focused on those middle class, good paying industrial jobs.
   The port had its best June in terms of import container volumes in four years, and Creighton said while that may turn out to be an anomaly, “we’re very comfortable and confident with the direction we’re headed.”
    Port of Tacoma Commission President Connie Bacon said the decision to form the alliance was driven largely in part to the container industry’s move toward megaships, such as the 18,000-TEU CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin that made a test call to Seattle’s Terminal 18 in Seattle in February.
   She noted the port is spending $141 million to improve Pier 4 in Tacoma so it can handle two megaships simultaneously.
   The alliance is also 90 percent finished with the design for Terminal 5 in Seattle, another terminal that could eventually handle megaships. Seattle has also created a “heavy haul corridor” for trucks.
   Under John Wolfe, the chief executive officer of the Alliance, the port has set up an operations service center aimed at improving efficiency and reliability, in addition to setting up an executive advisory council made up of stakeholders such as terminal operators, railroads, truckers, retailers, shipping lines and labor leaders.
   “We’ll continue to refine that service center working in partnership with the key stakeholders of our gateway and our customers,” said Wolfe. “We’re really going to step up our game over the next year in creating greater transparency of the movement of cargo through the gateway.
   “We’re re-engineering our gateway where we are going to have fewer, yet larger, international container terminals,” Wolfe added. “Today we have 7 international container terminals and a couple of domestic container terminals within the gateway I can see a future where maybe we have four, maybe five international container terminals.”
   With the slowdown in the global economy, Wolfe said it is possible that 18,000-TEU ships may not be calling Seattle or Tacoma on a consistent basis in the near future, but noted the investments to improve terminals involve hundreds of millions of dollars.
   “So we need to make sure that the facilities that we build will answer the call to the largest vessels that want to call Seattle Tacoma,” he said. “We’re fortunate and blessed to have natural deep water here in Puget Sound unlike some gateways around North America that require direct maintenance dredging and such. Our challenge is more the upland area making sure that the whole system works
   So these larger terminals will have the cranes capable of handling these large vessels and the road, rail infrastructure to support the influx of cargo.
   “Terminal 5, in particular, we don’t want to under build if eventually 18,000-TEU ships call consistently,” said Kurt Becket, the deputy CEO for the alliance, adding the 12,000-TEU and 14,000-TEU vessels are very much either on the horizon or calling the port.
   In addition to container cargo, the port is also focusing on attracting more automobile imports and non-containerized bulk cargo.
   As an example of the benefits of the alliance, Wolfe pointed to the decision by a joint liner service operated by Hamburg-Sud, Hapag-Lloyd and US Lines, which moved from a Tacoma terminal that was struggling with delivery challenges to a terminal in Seattle.
   “There was a cooperative effort in working with those shipping lines to make that move, because it served those shipping lines better within our gateway and allows them to grow their cargo within the gateway,” he said. “If that were to have occurred a couple of years ago before the formation of the Seaport Alliance likely what would have happened is Tacoma would have tried to hold those shipping lines in Tacoma and Seattle would have likely been competing to try to draw them out of Tacoma to Seattle. At the end of the day regardless of where they ended up it would probably would not have gone as smoothly as it did with this coordinated effort.”